Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Back in September 1981 Reagan had warned that without a verifiable nuclear arms agreement there would be an arms race and that if there were an arms race the US would win it. And so it proved. In retrospect, the American defense build-up would come to be seen as the cunningly crafted lever that bankrupted and ultimately broke the Soviet system. This, however, is not quite accurate. The Soviet Union could ill afford the armaments race upon which it had begun to embark as early as 1974. But bankruptcy alone would not have brought Communism to its knees. The Second Cold War, and America’s public belligerence, undoubtedly increased the strains on a creaking and dysfunctional system. The Soviet Union had built a military machine that defeated Hitler, occupied half of Europe and matched the West weapon for weapon for forty years—but at a terrible price. At their peak, somewhere between 30–40 percent of Soviet resources were diverted to military spending, four to five times the American share. It was already obvious to many Soviet experts that their country could not indefinitely maintain such a burden. In the long run the economic bill for this generations-long military build-up must come due.